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Over lunch at her home in the Bronx recently, Mary Rucker-Thomas spoke about the pride she felt for the enduring legacy of her husband, Holcombe Rucker.

Mary Rucker-Thomas, 81, in her home in the Bronx.

Many are familiar with Rucker, whose name became synonymous with the best of playground basketball before his death too young at 39, of cancer. They are probably not familiar with his widow, Rucker-Thomas, who at 81 is the keeper of the family flame even as the basketball tournament her husband founded no longer bears his name.

Every year at this time she has memories of frenzied Holcombe Rucker summers, when he organized neighborhood teams and tournaments and got professional players to play in Harlem before huge crowds. Had someone told the struggling couple that Rucker’s work with young people, using basketball as a vehicle, would make him legendary, they would not have believed it.

“Not in my wildest dreams,” she said. “That was the furthest thing from my mind, and I’m sure it was the furthest from his also.”

She added, “We were so busy trying to survive.”

The Ruckers’ life together was a love-testing struggle. Mary and Holcombe, raised in Harlem, married in 1947, when she was 16 and he was 21. She did not finish high school, and he dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year and joined the Army.

When he returned to New York, he found himself with no job prospects, no diploma, a young wife and, soon, a family. Rucker, with only a year and a half of high school, had many frustrating moments trying to find a job. It seemed that the cycle of poverty and disappointment from his childhood was continuing: never enough food, enough money, enough education.

Holcombe and Mary Rucker on their wedding day in 1947.

He finally got a custodial job at a New Jersey bank, but his unhappy youth became the source of his life’s mission: expanding opportunities, broadening horizons and empowering young, disadvantaged African-Americans in Harlem.

Rucker would engage them through basketball, which he had played briefly in high school. He established a youth league and a summer tournament in 1947 to provide an alternate recreation outlet. But Rucker had more in mind, making himself an example for achieving an education. He earned his high school equivalency diploma, and then a bachelor’s degree from City College.

Mary Rucker was no playground den mother, keeping the clock or keeping score. She had their first child at 17, their second at 18, their third at 21. She kept house and kept the family intact. She was mother and father and chief disciplinarian.

She gave her husband the leeway he needed to be a father to a community desperate for a shining light. “He was determined that he was going to get these kids out of the doldrums of Harlem,” she said.

Rucker would not allow players with failing grades to play for a period of time. He attended PTA meetings and more. “He went to class with me and taught me how to take notes and how to get organized,” recalled Peter Sherman, who was mentored by Rucker in the mid-1960s and worked in pharmaceutical sales for 31 years after graduating from college.

Rucker used his tournament’s popularity, the players it attracted and the growth of college and high school basketball to develop relationships with college coaches and administrators. He secured basketball scholarships for more than 700 players, including Sherman.

Building a program with a vision and no money put a strain on the Ruckers. He was using the skimpy family resources for kids who had less. Mary Rucker didn’t object to what he did but to the amount of time he spent doing it.

“We had some knock-down, drag-out arguments because I wanted him home,” she said. “I could appreciate what he was doing, but I felt that his family needed more of his time.”

His tournament and later Holcombe Rucker Park at 155th Street in Manhattan attracted star players — from Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving and Nate Archibald to Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant. Last summer Kevin Durant scored 66 points in a game at Rucker Park.

Over the decades since Rucker died in 1965, the offshoots of his tournament have become partners with businesses. For example, the Entertainers Basketball Classic tournament, which runs five days a week through Aug. 17, recently announced an official sponsorship with AT&T. But in his effort to keep the focus on education, Rucker resisted the temptation to go for grants and sponsorships.

“I used to fuss with him all the time,” Rucker-Thomas said. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you getting funding?’ He said: ‘I don’t want to get funded because I’d have to run the program the way they want. If I get funded, I have to do what they tell me to do.’ But he wouldn’t have had to go into his pocket. He wouldn’t have to come here into the house and the kitty. He knew that, but he didn’t do that.”

Basketball has become highly commercialized, a lucrative industry for the adults who have access to players, for the coaches who coach the players and for a few players. The educational imperative has been contorted into a shape Rucker might not recognize if he were alive.

In his view, basketball was a means to an end. Basketball for too many has become the end, and summer playground exhibitions like those that have replaced the original Rucker tournament have become part of the cattle call.

“That’s not what he was about,” Rucker-Thomas said. “That’s the complete opposite of what he was about. He realized that no matter how far you go, eventually education comes into play.”

Asked if she thought her husband’s legacy was in good hands, she paused, and then finally, simply, said, “No.” She declined to elaborate.

“Rucker’s goal was to help people who had stepped outside the box, and didn’t know how to get back in, find their way back,” she said. “He helped people who had lost touch with themselves and their surroundings get back to where they were supposed to be.”

In time she developed perspective about the commitment that consumed so much of his time.

“God put him here for a reason; that’s why he had to spend so much time involved in all of this,” she said. “He had a mission, and he had a short amount of time to complete the mission; that’s the way I look at it.”

While many who scored big on the playground have faded from memory, Rucker’s name lives on at the Holcombe Rucker playground in Harlem. It also lives on in education; a grandson, Sharif Rucker, is principal of the Holcombe Rucker School for Community Research in the Bronx.

“The name is still honorable,” Rucker-Thomas said. “It’s beyond belief that 47 years after he died, it’s like he’s still living. I’m so proud of Rucker; I’m so proud of his legacy because that’s who he is, that’s who he was.”

PALM COAST, Fla. — The enlarged black-and-white photograph, taken more than 60 years ago, was received and immediately framed. John Rucker gently and proudly laid on the table his irrefutable evidence that he had actually played ball with the Knicks.

“You see, I stand out,” he said, identifying himself with an index finger while acknowledging that few, if any, basketball-savvy seniors would have any recollection of him and would at first glance assume he was somebody else.

The 1950 Knicks. In the front row, second from left, is John Rucker, who was dropped before Sweetwater Clifton became the team's first black player.

A black man kneeling in a 1950 team photograph taken at the Knicks’ fall training camp in Bear Mountain, N.Y. — as novel a sight as an Asian-American, Jeremy Lin, is now — had to be Nat Clifton, known as Sweetwater, the first African-American player to sign an N.B.A. contract.

Except that it wasn’t.

“No, Clifton, he was much bigger than me,” said Rucker, looking admiringly at his 6-foot-2 and chiseled younger self, glancing in the direction of the Knicks’ coach, Joe Lapchick.

How John Rucker — 19 at the time, a 1950 graduate of Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High — wound up preceding Sweetwater Clifton in the Knicks’ camp is something of an unsolvable mystery, even to Rucker. Having no idea that he existed until coming into possession of the team photograph and tracking him to this quiet community north of Daytona, the Knicks will honor Rucker on Monday night at Madison Square Garden on what they are calling Pioneer Night in honor of Black History Month.

Decades before LeBron James and Kobe Bryant were a gleam in their parents’ eyes, Rucker might have made the leap from preps to pros, assuming there was ever a chance of him making a team that Lapchick would steer to the seventh game of the N.B.A. finals (where the Knicks lost to the Rochester Royals and their point guard, Red Holzman).

“I don’t know who invited me and why,” Rucker said. “All I know is that I got a letter asking if I would try out. I was 19 and didn’t give much thought about being the first black player, or anything. You have to understand: I was the only black guy on my high school team. I was used to that.”

As a sophomore at Erasmus, Rucker was a bench player for the 1948 city champions, coached by a city high school legend, Al Badain. His teammates were Alvin Roth and Herb Cohen, who were later implicated in the City College betting scandals.

John Rucker, 81, was a reserve on Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High team that won the 1948 city title.

Rucker, who lived in walking distance of Erasmus, the famous Collegiate Gothic building in the Flatbush section, wanted to play basketball at New York University but also had an offer to play minor league baseball. Al Campanis, a Brooklyn Dodgers scout, gave him a $3,800 bonus — a figure Rucker asked for when he saw that as the asking price for a house across the street from where he lived.

That fall, figuring he had nothing to lose, Rucker reported to a Knicks camp that included Vince Boryla, Harry Gallatin and Dick McGuire. But no Clifton, a 6-7 forward whose contract was purchased that year from the Harlem Globetrotters.

Like Rucker, Clifton was also a gifted baseball player, had been in the Negro leagues and that fall was finishing a minor league stay in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. That explained Clifton’s absence into early October. But what was the purpose of Rucker’s presence?

Gallatin, who saved the Bear Mountain photograph and sent it to the Knicks last year before they honored him at the Garden, said “it’s a blur” when asked if he remembered Rucker in camp.

“I do remember that Sweetwater came late and that it was a big thing that season because the league was finally integrated,” Gallatin said.

In addition to the debuts of Clifton with the Knicks and Chuck Cooper with the Boston Celtics, Earl Lloyd was the first black player to appear in a game, with the Washington Capitols. But when Clifton took the floor with the Knicks four days later, it was the culmination of Joe Lapchick’s dream. His Original Celtics barnstormed with the all-black New York Rens as far back as the 1920s, and he was an early campaigner to integrate the sport.

During a speakerphone call to Rucker’s home from Los Angeles, Lapchick’s son, Richard, an educator and human rights activist, asked Rucker what his two-week experience with the Knicks was like.

Rucker said it was lonely and at times inhospitable. He roomed by himself when others shared. He was befriended by few, though McGuire didn’t seem offended when Rucker told the ball-handling wizard that his passes weren’t soft enough.

As for his relationship with the senior Lapchick, Rucker said: “To tell you the truth, he was kind of aloof. He didn’t discourage me, but he didn’t give me any special instruction. I think he wanted me to take my lumps to see if I could take it.”

Given Joe Lapchick’s history, there was another plausible explanation for why he invited a 19-year-old to try out. Knowing that Clifton would be reporting late, could he have been trying to ease the tension by having Rucker serve as a stunt man of sorts?

“We’ll never have any way of knowing, but that’s certainly a possibility,” Richard Lapchick said. “It would certainly fit the image I have of my father to want to plan for something like that.”

In one of the last scrimmages Rucker participated in, he got into a tussle with one of his teammates. “Burns,” he said, not recalling the first name. “He was giving it to me pretty good, the elbows, and finally I had enough and threw a punch.”

As it turned out, a player identified as Jack Burns — who did not make the team — was positioned alongside Rucker in the team photograph.

Over the years, Rucker said he had decided that race had little or nothing to do with the isolation he felt before Lapchick cut him on the eve of the first preseason game. “They probably all wondered what this 19-year-old kid was doing there, thinking he was going to take their job,” he said.

Lapchick did help him land with a team in the old Eastern League, where he made about $75 a month and got to play in a preliminary to a Knicks game at the Garden. Rucker persevered in minor league baseball through 1957 before settling into a 20-year career as a city police officer and detective.

He was delighted to receive the call and the photograph from the Knicks, finally able to prove to his wife, Edwina, his friends and especially his basketball-playing grandson in North Carolina that he was — unofficially and momentarily — the Knicks’ first black player. “He wants me to get him Carmelo Anthony’s autograph,” he said.

But Rucker said he was like most Knicks fans these days, enthralled by the guy who until recently was only marginally more famous than him. If he had to choose, he might opt for a signature from Lin, one pioneer to another.

HARLEM — After leading the Knicks to seven straight victories, appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated and becoming an international media sensation, hoops star Jeremy Lin is being asked to bring “Lin-sanity” to Harlem’s iconic Rucker Park.

That’s the dream of Greg Marius, CEO and founder of the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic, which has run the Rucker Tournament at 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard since 1986.

This past summer, NBA all-star Kevin Durant became the latest player to add to the court’s legend by scoring an eye-popping 66 points during a game there.

“If I were Nike, I might consider making a mold [of his foot] right now,” Marius said.

Knicks officials said it was too early to think about what Lin will be doing this summer because of the shortened NBA season and how in-demand the player has become. The newly minted star is not currently doing appearances.

“He’s hardly had time to sleep,” said Andrew Krusco of the Knicks’ community relations department.

Marius said he is in the very early stages of speaking with the Knicks about having the team help install a state-of-the art scoreboard at Rucker Park that will show videos and instant replay, as well providing basketball clinics.

This year’s Rucker Park basketball season will kick off June 2 with a celebrity game, and the full tournament season will begin on June 18 and run through Aug. 20.

Lin’s appearance at Rucker could also help solve the question of what his nickname should be, Marius said.

Community Board 10 is considering adding Rucker Park at 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem to a list of sites and areas it wants to landmark. (DNAinfo/Jeff Mays)

Up until now, there’s been a series of puns riffing on Lin’s last name, from the ubiquitous “Lin-sanity” to “Linderella.” Film director and longtime Knicks fan Spike Lee has even solicited nicknames for Lin using Twitter.

Rucker Park has been the place many a streetball legend and NBA superstar have earned their nicknames. The Lakers’ Kobe Bryant got “Lord of the Rings” after his Rucker appearance, and the Charlotte Bobcats’ Kemba Walker, a Bronx native, is known as “E-Z Pass.”

Durant’s 66-point performance was so talked-about that they are still trying to come up with a worthy nickname for the Oklahoma Thunder star.

Hannibal, the announcer at Rucker Park who thinks up the nicknames, already has a few in mind for Lin, Marius said.

“Rush Hour,” the “Lin Factor” and “Chinese Connection” are just a few, he noted.

“He already has 1,000 nicknames, but we might have to change it,’ he said.

“It has to be a name that fits him perfect,” Marius said.

“But we don’t make up nicknames until you prove it live at Rucker Park,” he added.